Toffee and Brittle Confections of Sheer Unrivaled Deliciousness

Friends! Do you like sweets? Yes, you do. You crave the deliciousness of sugary treats. You defy your dentist at every opportunity! You like to fill your pockets with smackerels of goodness and mouthwatering crunch (wrapped in pretty packaging, of course, so as not to collide with the lint and old pennies and Barbie doll shoes and bits of stale "Veggie Booty" that also occupy said pockets. Or maybe that's just my pockets).

You deserve to eat these most amazing toffees and brittles. My dear friend Michele makes them, and she is a gifted artist. A trained chef!

They are all tasty. And get this...I don't even like sweets. I would rather eat a bag of Cheez Doodles any day, and yet I cannot resist the lure of the fascinating toffees and brittles at La Petite Occasion.

This one is my particular favorite: The Dark Chocolate Toffee Wafers. I need say no more. Look upon them, ye mighty dieters, and despair!

Yum.

Halloween Costumes of Years Past

This blog has been about as fallow as my pumpkin patch. I have a good excuse! I am working on my novel, which will bring me infinitely more money and fame and all that rot.

Tonight's entry is an exercise in my mental acuity, as I attempt to recreate the Halloween costumes of the last however-many years.

2008: DJ Lance Rock, star of the children's show "Yo Gabba Gabba." My nighttime costume: The board game "Twister," complete with a blue wig.
2007: A frightful orange-wigged witch. Hey, I had never been a witch before. EVER. It was new! It was fresh!
2006: The Snow Queen. I wore a white flimsy thing and some fake lamb's wool, and a glittery mask. And boots covered with white fabric. My children were a moose and lamb.
2005: Having just moved and had a baby, I was a goddamned chicken again. The kids in New Ro thought I was practicing some kind of hoo-do voo-doo with my Martha-Stewart-clever chicken feet made out of yellow dishwashing gloves.
2004: A big old malevolent chicken.
2003: I was a pumpkin. Nine months pregnant and angry, and overdue, I sat on my stoop and handed out candy for one of the first occasions in my life.
2002: The Radioactive Rabbit. This consisted of a horrible headdress made out of a paper bag, with plastic Easter eggs and Easter grass glue-gunned to the top of the bag. The mask had tennis balls cut in half for eyes, and studded with huge fake flowers. Oh, and the ears had leopard-print fabric accents.
2001: Methinks this was the first year I was a Snow Queen. We had a party at Boat, a delightful little bar in Cobble Hill. This time, I wore a very long and elegant white formal dress, which was originally employed during a Newport Party of very extreme good taste.
2000: I was a beautiful flower. I wore long white gloves, a flower headdress, and a dress I had staple-gunned together that was covered in small green leaves. If I have the dates right, this was the year I had a Halloween party during which my friend T. served cheese to random passersby from my stoop and my friends E. and T. and I wandered over to my brother's apartment to "spook" him, but wound up on the wrong floor trying to insert a key into the wrong door.
1999: Good luck remembering what I was this year. I am almost certain it was a Purple People Eater. I wore purple jeans and a purple top, and a big old horn in the center of my forehead. And I had wings!
1998: Okay, this was the costume that probably caused my husband to second-guess our entire marriage. I was the OCTO-MOOSE. I wore a green uni-suit made of green flannel, purple Converse sneakers, and a giant moose headdress. I also had this most bizarre homemade Octopus skirt, which my friend had picked up at a flea market. It included eight stuffed men's socks. And then I think we went out on the streets and played music on guitar, and I danced and ran about in the hideous costume. And chased my new husband saying "yah yah yah!" Enough said!
1997: The Reptile Queen. I had a hideous headdress made of snakes and lizards, and a green gown. With a reptile belt! This costume was HOT!
1996: This may well have been the year that I was Leguma, the Vegetable Goddess. I strode the streets of New York with a carrot headdress, and a slim green outfit accentuated by a belt made out of dangling produce. I believe I may have spent a significant amount on bell peppers this year, as I needed to costume for more than one event. At one party, a friend began to snack on my outfit.
1995: Oh Lord, my memory is hurting. Could it be that this was the year I was the Beast of Many Colors? I wore Leopard, Tiger, and a host of other animal pelts. I was walked around by my young friend H., who was dressed as an "old crone."

Any years missing or erroneous? Friends, please fill them in! And send photos! I could go back in time to the year that I was a little black cat in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

And the best costume of them all. The year is unknown, but it was early 90s for certain. I had not planned properly, and on Halloween night had to fashion a costume quickly with little at my disposal. Yet I had a tutu! And a pumpkin mask with snaggly, fabric teeth! And a Russian fur hat! Thence was born: BALLET PUMPKIN.

My Obsession With DJ Lance Rock Has Gone Too Far

I have spent an unseemly amount of time looking for the following items for my Halloween costume:

Fuzzy orange hat
Black, lensless Buddy-Holly style glasses
Orange tracksuit

This, all in the pursuit of transforming into the entity known as DJ Lance Rock, star of the children's show on Noggin, Yo Gabba Gabba! The show, which rightly should be called Yo Grabba Bong-a, features five weird, colorful monsters by the names of Toodee, Brobee, Foofa, Plex, and Muno. Stop pointing out that I know how to spell their names. My kindergartner made me spell them ALL last night so he could write them on scraps of paper.

DJ Lance Rock, an omnipotent sort of puppeteer, carries the group around in a case styled as a boombox, bringing them to life with the words “Yo Gabba Gabba!” and a slew of confetti. DJ Lance is so super-cool that not only do I want to be him, you will too…soon enough. He wears a clingy, lean little orange tracksuit circa 1972, white tennis shoes, and a fuzzy orange cap with goofy stars. And square black glasses. He’s a black dude with big, sparkly eyes. His teeth are admirably white. And he can dance! And so can you!

I like the monsters--they sing about nice things like good manners, and their dancing is infectious. Songs include "Don't bite your friends!", "There's a party in my tummy (so yummy, so yummy)" and "Jumpy Jump Jump"--a song with only those lyrics that goes on, and on, and on until you find yourself singing it over the breakfast eggs.

But it is DJ Lance Rock who, as deus ex machina, is the lifeblood of the whack-a-doodle world that is Yo Gabba Gabba. He’s up there in the heavens, grinning down at his little dildo-like monsters with a supremely beneficent air. He’s always happy. Why wouldn’t he be, looking that damn sweet in his orange tracksuit? Damn! Why was I not born under a different star—the star that pays you money for dancing around maniacally and grinning like a mad hatter?

I want to BE DJ Lance Rock. Halloween is coming.

At first, thinking that this show was hot! hot! hot! I imagined that costumes would be available online. But some knucklehead in marketing forgot to get that memo. I would have paid $29.95 for this costume, and I have paid that much thus far: Old Navy (orange garb), Brewers hardware (colored duct tape to make the stripes) and H & M (an orange scarf too ugly for words which I will fashion into a hat). Now, the sideburns and the glasses. They shall be mine.

I asked my son this morning if he thought that applying blackface would be going too far. "Yes, mommy," he said. "That would be going too far." And clearly, this has gone far enough.

Next up on Party Pony! A catalogue of Halloween costumes from years gone by.